Up Against the Walls- USA to Palestine

Posted on September 6, 2018

Join RCF in welcoming Susan Green, Art Forces founder, for a series of presentations on multimedia murals and stories of communities using art to resist colonial occupation and manifest visions for justice. Art Forces, working in partnership with grassroots community groups, uses community public art and technology, including murals, websites, social and new media, to inspire critical thinking and action. From the streets of San Francisco Bay Area to Olympia Washington, to refugee camps of Palestine and Lebanon, the projects make visible histories and relationships that have been obliterated and forgotten, making connections to national and global issues of social and environmental justice, borders, precarity, migrations, and decolonization.

The presentation will include a 22-minute in-progress video of community murals in Silwan East Jerusalem, called “Our Streets–My Homeland is Not a Suitcase”. The Palestinian village of Silwan, East Jerusalem, daily resists escalating attacks by Israel, the goals of which include the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population. In 2015, as part of its struggle against dispossession, the Silwan community worked with international artists to paint 1500 square feet of public murals embodying their identity, history, culture, and determination to remain on their land.

SUSAN GREENE is an internationally-known interdisciplinary artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her practice traverses cultural arenas, focusing on borders, migrations, feminism, decolonization, trauma and memory. She conducts research on intersections of trauma, creativity, resilience and resistance through multimedia projects she directs with Art Forces, which she founded in 2001. Sites of her 50+ public art installations span West Bank and Gaza, Palestine and refugee camps in Lebanon to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland CA. Greene initiated and directs the Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project in downtown Olympia.